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Info: Our guest is Ward Carroll, editor of military.com. Military.com is a website which provides news, information and support to current and former service members and their families as well as non-military readers. The website has over ten million members. Carroll discusses a wide array of defense issues, including the way procurement works in the Department of Defense. He relates the difficulty in cancelling major weapons systems funding. He cites an example of the F-22 fighter jet now projected to cost $250 million dollars per airplane. He says it is hard for lawmakers to cancel the program because the F-22 is assembled in 47 states and a number of foreign countries. Ward Carroll also talks about the total costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last ten years as contrasted with the initial amount Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the wars would cost. Overall troop strength is reviewed and projections for cutting troop levels are discussed. Carroll details some salary and benefit levels for U.S. Navy commissioned officers and enlisted men, as shown on his website, military.com. In addition, he looks at the top defense contractors paid by the U.S. government in 2011. He tells stories about his time flying as the radar interceptor in the back seat of the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. He discusses his career in the United States Navy, and his decision to go into journalism after teaching at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.